monuMental

Turkey and football are two pillars of the American Thanksgiving tradition, so I've combined the two into one disgusting image that I sincerely hope does not spoil your Thanksgiving appetite.

On my list of things that are worthy of giving thanks, there are many things that come before Michigan football. But not that many things. After two losing seasons, and in the midst of infighting amongst fans, it's easy to overlook the positives and forget about what we love about Michigan football. Now, I won't find seven or eight wins acceptable in any future season, but this is one example of something that is worth being thankful for given the current state of the program: a winning season. Here's the rest of my 2010 Michigan Football Thanksgiving list of thankful giving of thanks:

How it was made

I've captured the creation of this special edition Thanksgiving wallpaper artwork and sped up the footage to condense a little over 2 hours of design time into just under 2 minutes of video. Watching this video is a little like watching Martha Stewart prepare a meal, but without Martha Stewart, without the food and without a purpose.

The greatest rivalry in college football? It certainly hasn't felt like it for the last decade as Ohio State has dominated Michigan, winning 8 of 10 games since 2000.

This week's wallpaper is an artistic expression of the questions I'm asking as a Michigan fan. Will the darkness cast by the dominance of our bitter rival continue to spread, lending credibility to the sentiment that the program is eroding, or is the growth we've seen this year a genuine indicator of a future return to glory? I'm a defensive optimist at heart, so this season I've maintained realistic expectations while believing that better days are ahead.

I wanted the artwork for 'The Game' to capture the epic feel of the rivalry. My initial concept called for colliding planets, but I like the simplicity of one planet where the battle is fought over the same land. I also wanted the artwork to have an otherworldly feel, like how the rivalry would look if it was interpreted as a photo-real animated film where the good guys are represented by light and life and growth, and the bad guys are all shadow and concrete and harsh technology. I'm not sure if the message is any stronger here than it is with some of my simpler artwork (i.e. Maize is Blue) but I enjoyed the challenge of creating something with a high level of depth and detail.

The image below is a preview only. You can get this week's widescreen, 4:3, iPad and mobile wallpapers at The Art. The Art. The Art!.

How it was made

I've captured the creation of this week's wallpaper artwork and sped up the footage to condense a whole bunch of hours (more than I care to admit) into a little under 5 minutes of video. If you like edge-of-your-seat action and nonstop excitement, then you probably shouldn't bother to watch this video.

Wisconsin is cheese and football and funny accents, so I had considered several images for this week's wallpaper including a moldy wedge of cheese, some appropriately mocking phrases with Wisconsonese phonetic spelling or a play on the mining roots of the "Badgers" nickname. I wasn't sure until very late what stereotypical Wisconsin imagery I would use, but I knew from the beginning that the image would be rendered as a cross stitch because you can probably walk into any home in Wisconsin and find a framed cross stitch on the wall. Most cross stitch art is tacky and cliché, so I've created a tacky and cliché image of a Wisconsin football player with a literal cheesehead.

The image below is a preview only. You can get this week's widescreen, 4:3, iPad and mobile wallpapers at The Art. The Art. The Art!.

How it was Made - Sorry, no video this week

As usual the artwork is all digital, though somewhere along the way I started to wonder whether it would have been faster to actually cross stitch the thing and photograph it. Probably not, but after copying and positioning hundreds of individual thread images I may have a full-blown case of stitcher's hand. I captured the creation of this week's wallpaper on video but unfortunately I had some unresolvable issues and won't be able to share it with you. I'm hopeful that I'll be able to resume the video demos with next week's Ohio State artwork.

Update: User philbuster asked me if the title of this week's wallpaper was a reference to Greg Robinson's last press conference as head coach at Syracuse. The reference was purely accidental. I had completely forgotten about that press conference, but take a look at the video clip starting at about the 0:50 mark; funny coincidence. Or is it? (It is.)

According to the official Purdue Athletics web site, "Over the years, Purdue teams had been called grangers, pumpkin-shuckers, railsplitters, cornfield sailors, blacksmiths, foundry hands and, finally, boilermakers. That last one stuck." I'm more than just a little broken up that history stole from me the opportunity to design a "pumpkin-shuckers" wallpaper. Sigh. Instead, a replica of a Victorian-era locomotive became the official mascot of the Boilermakers in 1930 "to exemplify the engineering and agrarian heritage of Purdue." Because nothing says "intimidation" like agrarian symbolism.

For the last two seasons Michigan fans have seen "easy wins" against Purdue devolve into soul-crushing defeats. As I anticipate next weekend's contest, I see in my mind's eye a damsel draped in maize, tied to train tracks, terror in her eyes. A whistle echoes from the depths of a tunnel. The tracks rumble. A small light flashes in the darkness. The damsel turns away and closes her eyes. Where is her hero? Has she no defender? No, like our 2010 team, she is defenseless. What will emerge from the tunnel? Will it be a full-size freight train that rips her into a thousand pieces, or a miniature model train that bounces harmlessly off her rope-bound body?

The image below is a preview only. You can get this week's widescreen, 4:3, iPad and mobile wallpapers at The Art. The Art. The Art!.

How it was Made

I used screen capture software to record the creation of this week's wallpaper artwork and sped up the footage to condense 4 hours of design time into just over 4 minutes of video. If you like watching paint dry, or if you want to see the Photoshop equivalent of Bob Ross ruining a perfectly good painting with a giant foreground tree, then this video is for you.

I've been mostly successful this season at keeping my editorial voice out of the weekly wallpapers. However, this week poses several challenges in the "making fun of the opponent" category: a team with a Native American nickname and a program with no discernible traditions. Combine that with my utter disgust after Saturday's game and this is what you get. Actually, I had already finalized the concept for this Illinois wallpaper BEFORE the Penn State game and the original title was "They Be Illin'" but now it is me and you, fellow Michigan fan, who are doin' the illin'. I've changed the title to reflect how I feel at this point in the season; I was so disappointed after the loss at Happy Valley that I almost posted a completely blank wallpaper with the vow to continue posting blank wallpapers until the next win but, after three consecutive losses, designing these wallpapers is the one thing that helps me to move on emotionally (like art therapy).

That said, I haven't completely abandoned hope that this team can meet my original pre-season expectation of 7 wins and I'm firmly in the "let's wait until the last game is played before we cry for firings and lynchings and the like" camp. Here's to hoping that by late on Saturday afternoon we will all have moved on from illin' to celebratin' 6 wins and bowl eligibility.

I had several versions of this wallpaper bouncing around my head last week: everything from tackle twill letters on a retro track jacket to a blinged-out gold chain with diamond-encrusted letters ala Run DMC. I like where this ended up much better; the hoodie and lettering feel appropriately distressed and it gave me a very natural way to turn the last "I" into an apostrophe.

The image below is a preview only. You can get this week's widescreen, 4:3, iPad and mobile wallpapers at The Art. The Art. The Art!.

I wanted to design a special edition Halloween wallpaper and we're playing Penn State this week, so a JoePa Halloween costume was the natural choice. All I had to do was add a plastic nose and some bushy eyebrows to the slightly more respectful 2010 Penn State game wallpaper that I released on Monday. In my first version of this wallpaper I completely replaced the real frames with a pair of joke glasses, but thought it was actually funnier to attach the gag accessories to the real frames.

The image below is a preview only. You can get this week's widescreen, 4:3, iPad and mobile wallpapers at The Art. The Art. The Art!.